Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, the first Tibetan woman to publish poetry in English, turned 52 years old this year. She celebrated with a new poetry collection, Revolute. Published by Albion Books in a handmade limited edition of 165 copies that sold out in a month, it includes just three poems—the longest is 17 pages— that read like memories. Each dreamlike poem fractures into what could be interpreted as one short poem per page, but the sections associatively connect to form a whole. In an interview with Tricycle, Dhompa said the style reflects her “fragmented existence” living as a Tibetan in exile.

Dhompa was born on a train in India in 1969, a decade after her parents fled Tibet, and was raised by her mother in India and Nepal. Her father played no role in her life. After her mother’s death, she thought that keeping busy and being in an unfamiliar place might help lessen the pain of loss, so in 1995 she moved to the United States to pursue an MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. Later she earned a PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dhompa published two chapbooks, Recurring Gestures and In Writing the Names, in 2000. Her first full-length poetry collection, Rules of the House, published in 2002, was a finalist in the Asian American Literary Awards that year. Since then she has gained widespread recognition for four more books of poetry and her memoir, Coming Home to Tibet.

Dhompa’s work reflects what she described as her “small, compartmentalized lives”—at times living in Tibetan exile communities and at other times living where she was unable to disclose her heritage because she was an undocumented refugee. In Revolute’s title poem, she writes, “A poem is a map of intentions knotted into the landscape / children and women are instructed to follow back / to nation. Home defined by those who have not lost home.”

Loss of home and family is a recurring theme in Dhompa’s work. Her grandparents were killed in Tibet, her grandmother was shot by the Chinese military, and many of her other elders died in prison. Much of Dhompa’s national and familial history was intentionally and traumatically erased by the Chinese invasion. In “Revolute” she wonders, “Should all poems by us refer to the nation?” It’s a question she has asked herself many times. Sometimes she wants to write about something other than the exile experience, she said, but she realizes that she can never separate herself from the nation from which she was exiled. That she will always be from Tibet is evident right down to the language she uses. Dhompa has never lived in a country where Tibetan was spoken widely, and she writes only in English. Yet in her poetry, words like “freedom,” “citizenship,” and “belonging” carry the heavy weight of her heritage.

Tibet’s history and present affect Dhompa’s day-to-day activity, too. She doesn’t know her family medical history beyond her mother, for example, so when doctors ask for it, she often lacks the energy or desire to tell them why she can’t supply that basic information. In “The History of Sadness” she writes:

…history is cruel,
our fall falling without ceasing.
Even simple questions
trick us. What is your medical history? No branches
to fall back on, no headstone where they jumped
into the river, or shattered their hearts. To make
the doctor comfortable, I write, heart disease.

Writing “heart disease” on intake forms, Dhompa said, “seems the closest to true in some ways.”

For Dhompa, Tibetan poetry plays an important role in keeping accurate contemporary Tibetan experiences known and documented. Often when people talk about Tibet, she said, they speak of monks, compassion, meditation, levitation, and transcendence. But conversations about spirituality and Buddhism can omit crucial political context, like the parts of Tibetan history that were erased through genocide and the inability of Tibetans in exile to return to their homeland.

Her poems, Dhompa said, are attempts to have that conversation without having to have it aloud. The poems may omit some lost history, but the repercussions of those gaps infiltrate Revolute. As she writes in the title poem, “The heart knows what it cannot have.”

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With accompaniment from cheerful tones of mandolin, banjo, and fiddle, Laura Mustard’s second album, Treehouse, presents a vulnerable portrait of a woman on a journey toward self-acceptance. Mustard was born with birth defects that affect her digestive tract, among other things. By the time she was 2 years old, she’d had 14 operations, and she still has to make occasional visits to the emergency room. With this album, Mustard shares her medical struggles publicly for the first time. She spoke with Tricycle about how her Buddhist practice influences her music and how it helps her appreciate the present moment and accept her feelings of anger, frustration, and shame.

What is your Buddhist practice, and how does it influence your music? I’ve been practicing Buddhism since 2014, when I was 26. One day in Barnes and Noble, I wandered into the religion section and started to look at Buddhist books. I felt like I was having my life changed. After that, I mentioned to a friend that I was trying to practice meditation at home, and he said, “You should come to this Shambhala group.” I started going regularly. I read a lot of Buddhist books, too. Ethan Nichtern’s The Road Home is one of my favorites. I try to listen to it once a year. Those ideas get into my thoughts and therefore into my lyrics, down the line. And I think Buddhism has helped with self-acceptance. Just the idea of basic goodness has been an important philosophy for me.

In the music video for the last song on the album, “Nobody’s Road,” you show some of the medical supplies you use regularly, including a catheter and a syringe. You’ve mentioned that this is the first time you’ve shared that part of your life publicly. How did you decide to do that? I was born with a set of birth defects that impacted my urinary and digestive tracts, among a lot of other things. The music video for “Nobody’s Road” is a collage of my life. It’s made up of a bunch of pictures and objects, and it felt disingenuous to leave that part of my life out. I’m at a point where I’ve stopped caring what others think, partly from getting older and partly from the body positivity movement. I’ve joined a few groups on Facebook for people who have medical issues similar to mine, and it’s comforting to know that other people are going through the same struggles that I am.

As a kid, I felt like I was the only one in the world who had a latex allergy, a catheter, and all the other things I was dealing with. That was before social media. I know I have a unique story to tell, and I’m at the point where I’m not afraid to put it out there. I’m hoping I can either help other people who are living with the same kinds of medical conditions or demystify them and break down stigmas by using my platform to talk about them openly.

Has anyone picked up on Buddhist influences in your lyrics? The line in “Nobody’s Road,” “The sun is always there behind the clouds,” was definitely influenced by Buddhist teachings. One person said, “That sounds Buddhist,” but in general it’s a line people point to as a positive way to think of things that is inspired by Buddhism. It’s kind of like the Pema Chödrön quote “You are the sky. Everything else—it’s just the weather.”

A lot of your lyrics remind me of some of Pema Chödrön’s teachings where she reminds us that we can beat ourselves up about hardships we can’t change or we can be content day to day. Exactly. But I think it’s also okay to say “This is hard” or “This is annoying” or “This sucks.” If you do talk about something that’s hard—especially when it’s a medical thing—I think there’s pressure to put a brave spin on it or talk about it in the past tense like, “This was hard, but now I’m doing really well.” It’s cool when you have those moments, but it’s also okay to sit in the dissonance and tell yourself “It’s okay to be frustrated,” rather than shooting that second arrow the Buddha talks about—beating yourself up for feeling bad.

In “Teach Me How to Lie,” what does the line “there are parts of my fate I can’t change” mean to you? Do you tend to frame that positively, negatively, or neutrally? That line specifically refers to my medical situation. It’s something I was born with that’s always been there, and there’s no real cause for it. It just randomly happened during my development. But as a kid, it felt to me like a weird, fated thing. I think everybody has that in life, whether it’s your family, mental health, physical health, money, whatever. We all have stuff that’s hard, and we can’t always change it. I’m not sure if it’s negative or just neutral.

Can you talk about the role anger plays in this album, specifically in the song “She Must Go”? In “She Must Go,” the “she” is more like shame, but I think shame and anger are closely related. The song is a personification. It goes “She’s been following me for a long time. She breaks my locks, lets herself in.” It’s like a shame monster coming in the middle of the night to tell you everything bad that you think about yourself. I think that kind of shame can have an anger to it.

But if you strip down underneath that anger, it’s just hurt. The line “The only warmth comes from her own tears streaming down her cheeks” shows just how sad the picture actually is. If you strip all the anger away, it’s just this little kid crying on the bathroom floor. So I’m trying to learn to have compassion for that anger and also not to be mad at myself for feeling it.

Ethan Nichtern talks about compassion as a skill we build. We know that someone like Michael Jordan trained for years to get as good at basketball as he was, but we assume someone like Mother Teresa was just born like that. Really, compassion is a skill you need to practice having for other people and also for yourself.

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“I am abundance welcoming ghosts,” wrote David Morris, creator of and songwriter for the folk-rock band Red River Dialect, whose newest album, Abundance Welcoming Ghosts, was released in September 2019. Shortly after recording the album, Morris began a nine-month retreat at Gampo Abbey, a monastery in Pleasant Bay, Nova Scotia, whose principal teacher is Pema Chödrön.

On retreat, Morris found inspiration for the album’s title as he looked out his dorm room window. Observing the oceanside cliffs, he sensed a dark presence moving with the strong winds that blew through the area, and he recalled a quote attributed to the 11th-century Tibetan master Machig Labdron: “In other traditions demons are expelled externally. But in my tradition demons are accepted with compassion.” Speaking of the experience, Morris said, “I didn’t have a feeling of haunting or fear. I actually felt like I wanted to give that thing a hug, whatever it was.” At that point, he took out his notebook and wrote down the phrase that would become the album’s title.

Growing up the son of an Anglican priest in Cornwall, England, Morris first encountered Buddhism as a teenager through Beat poetry. He’s now been practicing for many years, and Buddhist sentiments resonate through the album. The chorus of “Slow Rush” rings out: “Body like a mountain, mind like the sky / breath like the wind; thoughts pass by.” Meditation and music, however, remain separate for Morris. “Music is a sensual realm. There can be ways of allowing yourself to melt into that, and it can be healing,” he said. “But that’s distinct from the vipashyana (insight) approach to formless awareness. Nothing beats the breath when it comes to meditation, because you can’t build up massive story lines about your breath.”

Gampo Abbey doesn’t generally allow visiting practitioners to play musical instruments.  But after six months, concerned that he would be out of practice when he returned to his life as a musician in London, Morris wrote a letter to the governing council asking if he could play guitar. For the final three months of his stay, the council gave him permission to play guitar in a solitary retreat cabin for one hour each day. The constraints of the time limit and his not having held a guitar in so long proved valuable. “It’s like letting the field lie fallow for a year,” Morris said of the hiatus. “The nutrients reaccumulate, and you can plant fresh things.” 

And while Morris looked forward to the music sessions, he admitted that once he was allowed time to play, he found himself writing songs during meditation sessions. During the breaks between sitting and walking meditations, he would rush to the bathroom, get his notebook, and quickly scribble down lyrics. “I can see why they don’t allow musical instruments,” he said a bit sheepishly. After the retreat, Morris met up with some musician friends in Montreal, where together they recorded the songs he wrote on retreat. The songs are set to be released in the summer of 2020 under his own name.

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Queens—New York City’s most ethnically diverse borough and its largest in area—ranks second highest in religious diversity among all United States counties, according to the 2020 PRRI Census. Even narrowing it down to Buddhism, Queens’s population is particularly diverse, as the borough is home to some of the country’s largest populations of immigrants from Tibet, Korea, and China.

The architecture of Queens’s Buddhist sites also ranges widely, from small nondescript houses to detailed temples nestled between typical city buildings. Construction is less dense than most of the rest of New York City, which leaves space for meditation in stunning flower gardens and backyard barbecues to celebrate His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s birthday. Temples belonging to a variety of traditions serve families and visitors alike all across Queens.

1| New York Tibetan Service Center

The New York Tibetan Service Center (NYTSC) works hard to keep Tibetan youth connected to their heritage and to strengthen community among the large Tibetan refugee population in Elmhurst and the adjacent Jackson Heights. They provide free after-school and summer camp programs along with peer mentoring and parenting workshops specifically geared toward Tibetan and Himalayan immigrant families. You can help support NYTSC’s programming at cultural events they host throughout the year, such as a Losar festival, with an art market, traditional Himalayan food, and performances in Tibetan and English.

83-02A Broadway, Elmhurst
nytsc.org

2| Hanmaum Zen Center of New York

If you look closely between two houses on 32nd Avenue in Flushing, Queens, you’ll spot a pagoda-like building behind thin metal gates. The Hanmaum Zen Center is open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., and the grassy grounds alone offer an oasis amid the busy city. The temple belongs to the global organization Hanmaum Seon Center, a branch of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, which has locations across the world.

145-20 Bayside Ave., Flushing
facebook.com/nyhanmaumpage

3| Sera Jey Buddhist Cultural Center 

The Sera Jey Buddhist Cultural Center—the US extension of Sera Jey Monastery in India—provides a long list of invaluable services to New York City’s Tibetan Buddhist community. You can visit them at the house they’ve been renting since 2012, where they host open events on holy days. If you live nearby, blessings and prayer services can be performed in private homes. Their mission includes interfaith dialogue and preservation of Tibetan language and culture, and their monks frequent Tibet House in Manhattan for ceremonies and other cultural occasions.

41-30 57th St., Woodside
serajey.org

4| Jung Myung Sa Buddhist Temple

In the decade before Jung Myung Sa Buddhist Temple was founded (in 1994), Queens’s Korean Buddhist immigrants had to travel hours north to the Catskill Mountains to practice. Now, the three-story temple provides a thriving community space for Korean Buddhists. Most of the temple’s current programming is in Korean, and they are currently working on expanding to include services in English. But even if you don’t speak Korean, the temple is worth walking by to view the lush garden surrounding the temple and the beautiful calligraphy sign that hangs above the front door.

162-11 Stanford Ave., Flushing
jungmyungsa.org/english

5| Chan Meditation Center

Originating as a small meditation group led by Master Sheng Yen, the Chan Meditation Center (CMC) moved to Elmhurst, Queens, in 1979. Since then, they’ve grown so much they’ve had to purchase three adjacent buildings to accommodate their sangha. The buildings serve as a small monastery for a handful of monks and nuns and as the headquarters of Dharma Drum Publications. CMC welcomes anybody interested in meditation and Buddhism to their meditation and chanting sessions, dharma talks, and t’ai chi classes. Though their main address is currently under construction, their temporary address is just up the street. You can find the full schedule of events on their website.

91-26 Corona Ave., Elmhurst
chancenter.org

6| United Sherpa Association

The United Sherpa Association is a central point of community outreach in Queens. Working out of two locations—a community center and a temple—they have set up a food bank for Nepali students, raised over $138,000 for Nepal earthquake relief efforts, distributed NYC ID cards with forms in Nepali and Tibetan to make them more accessible, and provided many other crucial community services. The association also hosts Himalayan cultural and religious festivals, presented as closely as possible to how they would be put on in remote villages. The United Sherpa Association is always working on something new, responding quickly to the Himalayan community’s needs as they arise. Be sure to check out their current efforts and events on their website or social media.

41-01 75th St., Elmhurst
sherpakyidug.org

The post The Buddhist Traveler in Queens appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

During the pandemic’s early days, acclaimed playwright and author Sarah Ruhl used poetry to keep structure in her life. Eventually, those poems were collected into her latest book, Love Poems in Quarantine, published by Copper Canyon Press in May 2022. The poems cover the mundanity of quarantine—how there was always more laundry to do and how somehow all the “free time” induced fatigue. (“I must need to rest. / Then rest from all that resting. / The new task, breath,” she writes.) 

Her poems also cover the serious national reckoning following George Floyd’s murder. She documents conversations with her children about race, examines her own whiteness, and reflects on white people’s reaction to the Black Lives Matter protests (“White people read White / Fragility on the beach / while Brown people die.”)

Sarah Ruhl’s plays have been finalists for Pulitzers, nominated for Tony Awards, and won numerous other prizes. She won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006, and her play Eurydice was turned into an opera and performed at the Met Opera in 2021. She and I spoke at the beginning of 2022 about haiku, race, and using poetry to mark time.

Love Poems in Quarantine is broken into three main sections: “Early days of quarantine;” “Poems written after May 25, the day George Floyd was murdered;” and “Haiku in Quarantine.” “Haiku in Quarantine” is then split by season. How did those sections come to you? Was it easy or difficult to break the book into those segments? It was fairly organic. I mean, I didn’t set out to write a book. I had really just set out to write haiku as a practice during the pandemic. Funnily enough, it began when the schools shut down. My son was bored one afternoon, and I thought, what are my gifts as a teacher since he’s not in school? I thought, well, we could do poetry together. So I wrote some haiku together with my son, and then it just became a natural practice for me throughout the pandemic.

The haiku seemed to be in conversation with the seasons and chronological, so that made sense. And then the longer-form poems seemed like their own thing. I noticed a real shift in the longer form poems before George Floyd’s murder and after George Floyd’s murder, and so it felt helpful to put a break in between to mark that shift.

Why did you choose to end with spring? How did you know when to end the book? It was hard to know [when to end it], because things just kept going on and on and on. I kept thinking I was done, and then I would just keep writing haiku. I started the poems in March 2020, and to do a full cycle and come back through spring felt hopeful to me, thinking about Taoism, cycles, and circles, and ending on an upward turn of the cycle.

Did the way that you measure time change during the pandemic? I think it did for everybody, right? I talk in another book about an existential experience I had once looking at the [Metrocard] machine where you have to decide whether to add value or time to your subway card. I was standing there thinking, wait, what even is time? What is value? Can you have value without time? Time without value? 

Quarantine felt like a question of what is time’s value when you appear to have so much of it but in a different way. I do feel like I got some thinking time back, which I really appreciated. It’s so rare in our culture to have slow, deep thinking time. That said, I was not an essential worker, and I think essential workers obviously experienced time in a totally different way than writers did during the pandemic.

The thread, in your book, of you entering menopause during the pandemic, was also fascinating, in that you were losing that way your body measures time. It was such funny timing to start menopause during the pandemic. Even the word menopause, this great pause in a cycle that you’re used to. At the same time, my daughter started bleeding. There was this sense of passing the baton, and it was funny in terms of measuring time—that she would start marking her time with blood, with these monthly cycles, when I stopped marking time in that way.

How did your energy alter to cope with the sudden change of pace at the start of the pandemic? Did you fight that change or did you embrace what was happening? I guess I embraced it. I started doing online 90-day meditation periods with the Zen Center in New York City. I would do daily meditation, often somewhere in nature, and I felt like that helped me be with time as it moved instead of resisting it. That practice period was intimately related to the practice of writing haiku every day.

Was there any reason other than teaching your son haiku that that was the form you chose? I was devoid of structure in my life, and haiku, a form with structure, calmed my mind and felt important to me. Also because it’s short form, I felt like it could happen in a little burst. So if I were dealing with the kids’ homeschooling or domestic tasks, it wasn’t something I had to sit and labor over all day. I also think there was something about really noticing nature during that time, and being able to really watch birds and watch the seasons change that felt related to choosing a haiku form.

Your poem “Mothers’ Day” explains that the history of the apostrophe in Mother’s Day shifted from “Mothers’ Day” to “Mother’s Day.” Why do you think it shifted more toward the individual? What are some reasons that change came to your mind during the pandemic? When I heard that history, I was fascinated by it. Meanwhile, someone had asked me to write a poem about peace. I was so intrigued that Mother’s Day used to mean the collective apostrophe and that it was created by abolitionist Julia Ward Howe, who really wanted to end war. She wanted mothers to get together internationally and say, “We can’t have our kids die anymore. This is crazy. No more war.” And then it became Mother’s Day, apostrophe s, and it became more about celebrating your individual mother and having gifts at home. I thought, God, that’s unbelievable. At the time, during the Black Lives Matter protests, I was also thinking about this lineage of Black mothers who had lost Black sons and Black daughters. So that’s how that poem came to be.

How much have you written about race or whiteness before this book? My play In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play) has to do with race to some extent, because there’s a Black wet nurse who comes to work for a white woman. And The Clean House has something to say about whiteness, I think. But in terms of examining my own whiteness, I would say very little.

When you were physically isolated with your family, how did conversations about race and racism arrive in your life? We were definitely talking about it, and we talked about George Floyd’s murder when that happened. We took the kids to Black Lives Matter protests. My husband is biracial—half Thai, half Australian. And so for my older daughter in particular, I think it was a time when she was thinking about identity and what it meant to be in a biracial family. Many of those conversations hadn’t happened in our family before.

Have you written about the pandemic in other genres? Not a huge amount. I wrote an essay for The Atlantic about the experience of doing a Zoom funeral for my father-in-law. I think there’s one haiku about it [in the book]. And I did not write a play during the pandemic. I think I felt so sad that we couldn’t go into a theater to even read it out loud. There was a real melancholy blanketed over the theater worlds. And so poetry and prose just felt more calming and more helpful to me during that time.

What is the importance of having a poetic record of uncertain and destabilizing times? It felt important for my mind to archive itself. I didn’t think it was particularly important for the public record. Although, I did conceive of the haiku as little gifts to my writer friends that I would send them from time to time. But I felt like my mind needed to mark the time just to get through it.

The post Haiku to Measure Time appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Poet, journalist, and dancer Tishani Doshi has a knack for detecting remarkable stories. In her latest poetry collection, A God at the Door, which came out in November, she writes, among other things, about seven Indian men who quarantined in a tree and a Russian photographer who waited eleven months to capture a rare photo of an Amur tiger. But her stories of wonder often dwell within tragedy. The seven men belonged to millions of workers who walked hundreds of kilometers to their home villages when India imposed a COVID-19 lockdown with four hours notice; hundreds of these migrants died on the road. And Amur tigers are so rare because they’re a critically endangered species due to habitat loss and poaching. Doshi spoke with me about how she uses poetry to reveal how often wonder and tragedy coexist and how stories—religious, spiritual, and political—impact our actions.

A God at the Door references many religions, often in a single poem. “Pilgrimage,” for example, contains images of circumambulation, the self-help industry, relics, the devil, altars, and crucifixion, to name a few. How do you see different religions interacting in your poems, in this book, and in your life? My father comes from a Jain Gujarati family, and my mother a Welsh Protestant one. I grew up in India, where you breathe every kind of religion, not just your own. We celebrated Christmas and Diwali at home, but they were less faith-based and revolved more around ritual and family. My best friend in school was Ismaili, [a Shia Muslim community], and there were pictures of the Aga Khan in her house. I remember being so intrigued. I went home and asked my mother, “Why don’t we worship a god who wears a suit?” 

Most of my childhood was spent being acutely aware that other people had a god or gods. Because my parents come from such different backgrounds and were making a life together, the notion of God was there, but wispy, and they wanted to give my siblings and me the freedom to choose our own paths. So I became a kind of pan-spiritual seeker as a teenager. As a writer I’m concerned with all those old ideas that religions have tried to speak to: love, fear, death, what comes after. 

Many of your poems take unique shapes on the page—one takes the shape of a tree; others oscillate between left justification and right justification. How do you decide which poems will take less conventional shapes? How does shape affect how a reader experiences a poem? I don’t know that I choose which poems will take a special shape. It’s more that some poems demand a certain form. Form is how you guide the reader into the poem. It can involve play, mystery, humor, geometry. There’s also a great tradition of “picture poetry” in India, and many traditions where the sonic and ionic join together to generate effect—like yantras and mantras, and I suppose I liked the idea of working into these old traditions in my own way.

In “Tree of Life,” you write about seven Bengali men who returned from cities to their villages when India imposed a countrywide lockdown. The men self-quarantined in a tree outside their village to prevent spreading COVID-19. How did you hear about this story? What is the balance of noting that we can often find some romance in tragedy without ignoring the true horrors of tragedies? I read about them in the news. India’s first lockdown was announced so suddenly that there was no time to prepare. Millions of daily wage laborers left the big cities on foot and walked home to their villages, journeys of days and weeks. It was an astonishing, heartbreaking sight. People walking with their children on their shoulders, their few belongings, sometimes, even a pet duck or dog. There were many deaths, and amongst all this was this story of seven men who had to quarantine in a tree outside their village, because their homes did not have enough space for them to be separate from their families. It reminded me of Satyajit Ray’s film Pather Panchali, which was accused of being too romantic but was a tragedy nevertheless. The forest and the trees in it are almost magical, and even in the most desperate situations people still find ways to laugh and love.

It’s such a powerful concept—the idea of creating time. I think all writers are obsessed with time and are having conversations with the dead and living.

Do you sit down with the intention of writing about politics and social issues, or do those topics appear in your poems simply because they’re part of life? It’s hard to know how poems begin. It’s still a mystery, and no matter how many poems you write you don’t necessarily know how to begin the next one. The Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva has a beautiful essay called “The Poet and Time” where she writes, “To be contemporary is to create one’s time, not to reflect it. Or, to reflect it, only not like a mirror, but like a shield.” It’s such a powerful concept—the idea of creating time. I think all writers are obsessed with time and are having conversations with the dead and living. Partly what a poem does is allow you to transcend time, to arc toward the universal using wisps of newspeak and ginkgo leaf and whatever else you can fit in your grist.

Your poem “Instructions on Surviving Genocide” reveals tension between the reality of war/genocide and the narratives of history—the difference between reading words on a page about smallpox blankets and actually being given one or handing one out. How do you think poetry communicates these tragedies differently than, say, a history book or a news article? To a large degree, history is interpretation. We look back at a certain period and define it a certain way, and then a hundred years later we change the way we look at it. So it’s always shifting, it’s not a fixed thing. It’s about power as well, as [Nigerian novelist] Chinua Achebe put it: “Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” We might collectively hope that the biggest genocides are behind us, but we know that’s not true. When you investigate the history of one genocide, you enter a galaxy of genocides. It’s terrifying. Extermination is a human tendency, it seems. And so the poem sits with the difficulty of this for a while before suggesting that survival may involve striking out alone. Poetry is about sitting with these confrontations, not passing judgment, not explaining.  

A God at the Door also includes images of tragedy caused by climate change. Referring to the previous question, does the same apply if you replace “war/genocide” with climate change? Does poetry communicate climate change differently than a history book or news article? I’m really interested in how the language of natural disasters (which are often exacerbated by climate change) has been co-opted to describe tragedies that humans have created. During the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, we were told that the virus was a typhoon, a tsunami, a cyclone, that was tearing through us indiscriminately. This use of language obfuscates on two levels. One: the notion that nature is fierce and there’s nothing one can do to prevent these events. Two: that blame cannot be assigned because there were no warnings and it was out of the realm of control. 

In fact, if governments had made different decisions, many lives could have been saved during this pandemic. If we cared about deforestation and soil erosion more than we cared about coal plants, perhaps we could be more prepared for some natural disasters. A poem can work as a kind of intervention. Not to wag a finger, but to create an alternate space where these things can be considered.

The speaker of “In a Dream I Give Birth to a Sumo Wrestler” is reminded by witnessing her brother’s physical deterioration that “all we have are these bodies.” Can you elaborate on how witnessing a failing body, one heading toward death, reminds us that death will happen to us, too? In your view, how has the pandemic affected the general acknowledgment of that fact? I’ve worked as a dancer for many years, so the body is my central preoccupation. It’s a glorious but flawed entity, a source of great power and beauty, but also of limitation. I’m interested in how we experience estrangement with our bodies, how sometimes we undergo an out-of-body experience because we are ecstatic and sometimes because we are lost. 

During the pandemic, we were reduced to this disembodied state. We had to stay still, other people’s bodies were suspicious, we could not touch the ones we loved, we could not gather in rooms or gardens and feel the heat of other bodies. We got flattened behind computer screens, and this is how we attended funerals, weddings, and everything else. The reminder of mortality shapes our life, and this surely deepens as we grow older. But in truth, I’ve always been acutely aware of this fact. How, as you put it, death will happen to us. It feels like the one constant we have.

How did it feel to write about the pandemic with it still going on? Although, does that question also apply to climate change? This past year and a half I’ve heard people say that we are living in such extraordinary times. I keep hearing it, and it’s true—the pandemic has been and continues to be a potent time, something the globe is experiencing together. But doesn’t everybody believe at some point in their lives that they are living in extraordinary times? Doesn’t it always feel as though the sky may be falling upon us? Part of writing is to write into the ongoingness of ordinary life, of wonder, of disbelief. If you wait for a feeling of resolution, then maybe the poem doesn’t need to be written.

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Brooklyn-born artist Chitra Ganesh’s unique blend of mythological, religious, political, and popular imagery stems from the summer trips she took to India while growing up. There she encountered thousand-year-old statues and paintings alongside advertisements, graffiti, movie posters, and comic books. She began bringing things home from her trips and piecing them together, each tidbit in conversation with the ones beside it. This prompted her initial artistic process of creating traditional collage pieces.

Since then, Ganesh has earned an MFA from Columbia University and has shown her art around the world. Her paintings, animations, installations, and murals have been exhibited at galleries and institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, the Rubin Museum, MoMA PS1, and others across the US, Europe, and South Asia.

Ganesh’s artwork incorporates Buddhist and Hindu religious and folkloric iconography while drawing on feminist and queer scholarship, her dedication to political and social activism, and popular culture. In an interview with Ocula Magazine, Ganesh noted that for many middle- or lower-middle-class immigrant families like hers, popular culture from their countries of origin provides a “bridge of sorts to the idea of home.”

She adds fantasy elements to much of her art, too, to help viewers see themselves in characters they typically wouldn’t relate to, she told Hyperallergic. When you remove some reality from a story, she said, people will feel more comfortable empathizing. Ultimately she strives to add representations of femininity, sexuality, and power to canons of literature and art where these themes have historically been absent.

In India, Ganesh encountered thousand-year-old statues and paintings alongside advertisements, graffiti, movie posters, and comic books. This prompted her initial artistic process of creating traditional collage pieces.

Ganesh adds fantasy elements to her art to make it easier for viewers to empathize with characters other than those they typically see themselves in. When you remove some reality from a story, she says, people will feel more comfortable empathizing.

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With bits of copper wire still stuck in her fingers, Venerable Sister Clear Grace sat at a laptop inside her partially renovated van. “Liberation should not be ours alone,” she said via Zoom. “It should be offered to the many.” This is the mission behind her decision to convert a 2003 Chevy van into a contemplative dwelling place and meditation hall. The monastery on wheels is the centerpiece for her Traveling Nunk project, which is making dharma teachings accessible to those who would not otherwise have access because of location, time, and financial constraints. She began her travels (which are being documented on the Traveling Nunk YouTube channel) in September and has been visiting towns that, as she puts it, “are listed on Google as the top places not to visit in North Carolina.” To Sister Clear Grace, the bodhisattva vow to alleviate suffering for all beings means that she must uncover the beings who are suffering. When she sat and contemplated how to take action, the idea for the mobile monastery, which she calls “the Great Aspiration,” came to her.

Sister Clear Grace already has plenty of experience living on the road. Her mother gave birth to her at the age of 17 and while trying to survive as a single working mother often ended up with abusive partners. Looking for safety and an affordable home in an increasingly gentrified California, she and her mother moved multiple times a year up and down the state.

She learned what steps she needed to take by watching YouTube videos.

Sister Clear Grace grew up in the Christian church, to which she attributes her strong connection to religious communities. She encountered Buddhism through a good friend when she was in her twenties and began to delve more deeply into the tradition while living in Louisiana during the three years following Hurricane Katrina. Buddhism was, she said, “where I was first able to touch and understand suffering.” Seeking transformation and healing, she eventually decided to become a nun and ordained in California at Deer Park Monastery, established by Thich Nhat Hanh. It was there that she came up with the term “nunk” through riffing with another monastic on the terms “nun” and “monk”; they landed on “nunk” to escape the preconceptions associated with gendered bodies and to embrace both worlds.

As for technical building skills, Sister Clear Grace began her renovation project with virtually none. She learned what steps she needed to take and how to execute them by watching YouTube videos of other people documenting their van renovations. Sometimes, too, people have donated skills and advice to her as alms. When she was stumped about why her van’s electrical system wasn’t working and was shooting sparks, a couple in Asheville, North Carolina, near where she was based, gave her a free consultation—one that would typically cost $125.

Sister Clear Grace’s ultimate vision for the Traveling Nunk project is to receive enough alms regularly to support herself and her van and also be able to meet some of the needs of the communities she visits. Her path of practice may seem untraditional for a monastic, but she feels that her current course brings her closer to the Buddha’s teachings. Even if she doesn’t belong to a static monastery with a dedicated sangha of monastics, she is proud to walk among the people, entering communities and attending to suffering that outsiders may not be paying attention to. “That’s the vision of the Great Aspiration,” she said, “to do the work that not many can do, to contribute my capacity for understanding, to keep an unlimited heart that is always expanding, and to be creative in how I share suffering with others.”

Keep up with the Traveling Nunk here.

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Saxophonist and composer Dan Blake’s latest album, Da Fé, opens with an eerie piano solo titled “Prologue—A New Normal.” The track is meant to warn of the world that awaits us if we don’t act against climate change. Blake’s warning is only the tip of his activism: since 2015 he has served on the board of Buddhist Global Relief, which combats hunger and malnutrition, and has produced benefit concerts for them since 2010. More recently, he has organized on behalf of organizations such as Extinction Rebellion, a global environmental movement and the Poor People’s Campaign. Blake, who holds a PhD in music theory and composition and teaches at the New School in New York City, has been a Theravada Buddhist practitioner since college. Now 40, he sees using his platform to bring attention and funds to social justice work as crucial.

Blake spoke with Tricycle about the relationship between music and enlightenment and how jazz has always fueled social change.

How did you decide on the title of your album? I was reading Auto-da-Fé, a novel by the German-language author Elias Canetti. I found out that the title of the English translation refers to a religious ceremony in the Spanish Inquisition when heretics were burned at the stake. At the same time, I was reading Time to Stand Up, by the Buddhist teacher Thanissara, who talks about the need to engage in direct action against climate change. The fires in California were becoming more frequent then, and all this led me to ask: Are we sacrificing ourselves? What are we sacrificing ourselves for? Why would we, as a species, allow this to happen?

The term da fé in Portuguese literally means “of faith,” so more questions came to mind: What do we have faith in? What is the meaning of faith in a society like ours? What can spiritual practices teach us?

How does making music, for you, respond to those questions? A lot of musicians talk about a very deep kind of listening that brings us close to one another. We share a deep bond that can’t be articulated. And then I learned about the bodhisattva of compassion, Guanyin, who realized enlightenment through listening. Her name translates as “perceiver of the sounds of the world.” There’s a direct relationship between sound and compassion and therefore between music and compassion. The question then becomes: How do you bring that into the world? Playing music, even music that I’m really proud of, does not directly feed people who are hungry. It doesn’t stop climate change. It might raise consciousness and make people listen, but the question, for me, is this: What more is there?

Jazz has a long history of being tied to social activism. What is there about the genre that makes that connection so present? In my view, the role of artists in social movements is to support the people who are doing active work on the ground. The most famous case of this in jazz would probably be Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” released in 1939, which focuses on lynching in the Jim Crow South and raised consciousness of the existing social movement begun by activists like Ida B. Wells. Holiday was persecuted by the FBI and suffered dearly because of her tenacious and courageous performance of that song.

Another element of this comes out of the mid-1960s with the legacy of John and Alice Coltrane—a legacy of potential spiritual awakening through music. John Coltrane’s famous album A Love Supreme is about the idea of there being a love so powerful, so universal, that it could unite all of humanity and connect us to a healing cosmic vibration.

How does creative problem-solving during music improvisation help you with creative problem-solving in other areas of your life, like your activism? Oftentimes in a playing situation there’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of wondering “what’s happening here, what’s my place in this?” It’s similar to how I think about myself in relation to the larger world and to climate and social movements. I believe that the clearest way artists can engage in activism is by using their platform to speak about what they believe to be moral imperatives. What kinds of creative solutions can we find to address the issues that we care most deeply about?

It’s important to me to focus on the work being done, often by people we never know about or meet. I think about someone like Samuel Nderitu and his wife, Peris Wanjiru. They’re farmers in Kenya who are developing an incredible network of small-scale agricultural families that are learning sustainable agricultural practices to feed their families. They are also taking control of a local food supply chain. This will allow them to avoid the predicament of so many people in Kenya—finding themselves at the hands of multinational agricultural companies like Monsanto.

To me, the single most important thing is to pay attention to the movements being organized right now and to focus on that work and those people as much as possible. Quite simply, they’re my heroes.

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Nothing is permanent, so everything is precious. Here’s a selection of some happenings—fleeting or otherwise—in the Buddhist world this week. 

Tibetans Caught in India’s Outbreak of COVID-19 Cases

Tibetan residents in India are caught among the rising numbers of cases as India battles an unrelenting outbreak of COVID-19 infections. On Thursday, the Indian health ministry recorded 410,000 cases in 24 hours, a new global record, with experts suspecting the actual number of infections to be much higher, the New York Times reports. The number of cases is rapidly climbing in Dharamsala, home of the Tibetan government in exile, with nearly 140 Tibetans testing positive since last week. In response to the outbreak, the Central Tibetan Administration issued an urgent appeal to Tibetan communities worldwide to donate to India’s COVID-19 relief measures. According to Radio Free Asia, a shortage of vaccines at Delek Hospital, the largest Tibetan hospital in India, has halted the campaign to vaccinate Tibetans age 18 and older in Dharamsala. Dr. Tenzin Tsundue told RFA that Tibetans should not wait for Delek Hospital to receive more doses: “I urge Tibetans to get vaccinated in government hospitals now if they get the chance.” Further south in Dehradun, capital of the northern state of Uttarakhand, 225 Tibetans have tested positive, including 83 monks from the local Sakya monastery. 

Upcoming Talk Addresses the Emergence of Black Buddhism in the US

A new talk from Buddhist Currents, an ongoing series of conversations focused on critical contemporary issues in Buddhist thought and practice, will illuminate the emergence of Black Buddhism in the US. Led by Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad, the director of Peace and Justice Studies at Warren Wilson College, the talk will explore how the field of Buddhism and Psychology is expanding to recognize intergenerational trauma resulting from slavery, Black Buddhist practices, and the reclaiming of Black embodiedness. The free event will be held on Zoom on May 20 at 5 p.m. PT (8 p.m. ET). 

73-year-old Tricycle Contributor Charles Johnson’s Career Continues to Thrive

Last year during a Tricycle Talks episode, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief James Shaheen asked writer and cartoonist Charles Johnson if he ever sleeps. Apparently the answer is “no.” A Tricycle contributor, Johnson is also a professor of creative writing, the author of 25 books—one of which won the 1990 National Book Award for Fiction—and a 1998 MacArthur fellow. This spring, Johnson’s cartoons will be featured in the anthology It’s Life as I See It: Black Cartoonists in Chicago 1940-1980, which will be published by New York Review Comics on June 1. In a Hawaii Review of Books featured interview between Johnson and Thuy Da Lam about his recent book of nonfiction, Grand: A Grandparent’s Wisdom for Happy Life, Johnson said: 

From my early life forward, it has always been a challenge for me to bring together all the things in my life that I love, partly because there are so many things that I love—drawing, writing, family, philosophy, martial arts, Sanskrit study, a passion for the sciences (and science fiction), chess, comic art, and Buddhism. But I think what I’ve realized in 72 years is that all these things are connected and overlap, if one approaches them creatively, as I’ve tried to do. 

Leaders of Many Buddhist Traditions Come Together for a Healing Ceremony Amidst National Anti-Asian Violence

On May 5, 49 days after a gunman killed eight people in Atlanta, including six Asian women, 49 Buddhist monastics, priests, and laypeople gathered in Los Angeles for a memorial ceremony amid anti-Asian violence, the New York Times reported. 49 days marks the amount of time some Buddhists believe it takes the deceased to transition to their next realm. The ceremony, titled May We Gather, took place at a temple in Little Tokyo that was recently the site of an arson attack. Over 350 Buddhist temples across the country participated via livestream. Duncan Ryuken Williams, a Soto Zen priest and Tricycle contributor who helped organize the event, spoke about the symbolism of the lotus flower blooming out of muddy water—significant because lotus flowers will not grow out of clean water. He said, “Our liberation is actually not about transcending or distancing ourselves from trauma or pain and suffering, but it is to acknowledge how we can transform ourselves, our communities, our nation, our world, from all that pain.” 

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Nothing is permanent, so everything is precious. Here’s a selection of some happenings—fleeting or otherwise—in the Buddhist world this week. 

Thai Temple Sets World Record with 330,000 Candles on Earth Day

Monks at the Dhammakaya Temple on the outskirts of Bangkok lit 330,000 candles on Earth Day in an attempt to break the Guinness World Record (GWR) for largest burning image, according to AFP News Agency. The candles were arranged around the temple’s central shrine in the image of a world map and a large meditating figure, along with the event’s slogan: “Cleanse the Mind, Cleanse the World.” Over 400,000 people watched via Zoom as monks lit candles, chanted, and led a group lovingkindness meditation. 

According to the GWR website, the temple’s impressive display broke the world record with an official count of 256,477 total lit candles, beating out the previous record of 56,680. Although the temple succeeded in their goal, their choice to burn so many candles on Earth Day—a global event in support of environmental protection—sparked some concerns about the harmful effects of burning paraffin wax. Thai environmental health expert Suwimon Kanchanasuta told AFP that while it’s currently unclear what type of candles were used, certain products could contribute to air pollution. 

American Ambedkarites Fundraising for COVID Relief Efforts in India 

A deadly second wave of coronavirus in India continues to overwhelm the country’s hospitals, leaving those who can’t afford private healthcare especially vulnerable. In response, a nonprofit in the Ambedkarite Buddhist tradition—known for mass conversions of members of the underprivileged Dalit caste turning to Buddhism to escape the Hindu class system—has opened a free COVID care center that will treat patients at substantially lower costs for at least four months. The Ambedkar Association of North America (AANA) has been fundraising for urgent COVID-19 relief efforts in India, where more than 300,000 new cases per day have brought an already strained health care system to its breaking point, the New York Times reports. Donations to help cover the AANA clinic’s expenses—including the cost of medical equipment, oxygen, and medicine—can be made at their website.   

Dalai Lama Donates to Indian Relief Fund

The Dalai Lama has donated to the Indian prime minister’s COVID-19 relief fund, he said in a statement released Tuesday. The PM’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations (PM-CARES) Fund was established in March 2020 to fight the spread of the virus, but it will remain in place to be used during any national emergencies. The Dalai Lama said that he asked his trust to donate “as a token of our solidarity with fellow Indian brothers and sisters.” The Tibetan spiritual leader has lived in Dharamsala ever since he fled to India in 1959. COVID outbreaks in India are dangerously high, new variants have been emerging there, and they are facing a serious vaccine shortage. Just over 8 percent of India’s total population has been vaccinated, compared with 43 percent and 64 percent of US and UK populations, respectively. The PM-CARES fund, which runs entirely off of donations, will help create infrastructure to better manage the pandemic, in part by distributing vaccines as efficiently as possible as they become available. The Dalai Lama’s statement did not specify the amount donated to the fund.

Calls for Humanitarian Aid for Monks and Nuns in Myanmar amid Military Junta

The International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB) and the Clear View Project launched an urgent international appeal for humanitarian relief for Buddhist monks and nuns living in Myanmar following the military junta, announced Buddhistdoor Global. An INEB representative explained that monastics generally are not being targeted by the military at this time, but key monks have been arrested, unlawfully detained, and injured. The relief groups requested funds for food, blankets, medical assistance, and legal council for about 20 monks who were arrested. No nuns have been arrested as of April 30. INEB also asked for funding to help meet the essential needs of about 1,000 monks and nuns who are leading non-violent protests. Tricycle’s recent Myanmar coverage can be found here and here.

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